


can i go where you go?

by afewreelthoughts



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: F/M, Fix-It, Light Angst, Post-Canon, Post-Canon Fix-It
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-10
Updated: 2020-04-10
Packaged: 2021-03-01 18:01:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,390
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23571268
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/afewreelthoughts/pseuds/afewreelthoughts
Summary: Gendry struggles to fit into his new role as Lord of Storm's End, but perhaps he doesn't have to do so alone...
Relationships: Arya Stark/Gendry Waters
Comments: 12
Kudos: 124





	can i go where you go?

**Author's Note:**

> written for a gift fic on tumblr; title lifted from "Lover"
> 
> I own nothing and make no money from this. Everything belongs to George R.R. Martin.

The day Gendry arrived at Storm’s End, a crowd gathered outside the walls, but they were not there to meet him.

“I’m Lord Gendry Baratheon,” he told the man who introduced himself as the castellan. Gendry lifted his chin high and hoped that everyone there might believe he had a real claim to this place, even if he still didn’t.

“My Lord, we’ve anticipated your arrival,” the castellan said and bowed his head. “Allow me to escort you to your new home.”

They galloped along the cliffs to a stout, round castle on the water’s edge. The crash of the waves filled Gendry’s ears. King’s Landing was on a river, slow and tame, and in all his travels, he’d never really seen the sea. Eastwatch was on the water, but it was sluggish with ice. This was something much wilder.

_She’d like it, I think…_

“Are these the people of the Stormlands?” he asked, nodding at the people gathered around small fires and the tents and bedrolls along the shore. “Please say they didn’t all come here for me.”

The exhausted people looked up at Gendry as he passed, as if glad to have something new to see.

“King’s Landing’s in ashes, my lord,” the castellan said, “and there’s neither king nor queen to rebuild it.”

Gendry had seen the plumes of smoke from miles away as they traveled south, and his party had gone west to avoid what Ben dismally called “the scourge of dragons.”

“But King’s Landing…” Gendry didn’t want to say anything stupid, but worried he might sound even more idiotic if he didn’t say anything at all. “King’s Landing is so far away.”

“Some of them have been walking a long while, looking for some place new to put down roots. Then rumor traveled south that Storm’s End was to have a new lord…”

“So they _are_ here for me?”

“We can make them leave if you wish, my lord.”

Prickles ran down Gendry’s spine, and he sat up straighter. “Let them be.”

The drawbridge opened, and their horses clattered across it.

The castellan rode to the center of the courtyard and raised his voice to the assembled crowd. “King Robert’s son and the next lord of Storm’s End, Lord Gendry Baratheon.”

All the heads Gendry could see turned to him. His horse shifted, clearly as uncomfortable with the attention as he was.

“We’re all very glad to meet you, my lord,” said the man who took Gendry’s reins.

“Thank you,” Gendry said.

“Storm’s End has had four lords since the spring. We hope you’ll be the last for a while.”

The castellan left to talk with Peter and Marc and Ben and the rest of them, the men who’d traveled all the way south with Gendry, and who would be going back to Winterfell now that he was safely delivered. A page took his horse, and another man who introduced himself as the steward walked Gendry up the many stairs to the lord’s chambers.

The door creaked open, and Gendry squinted into darkness. The windows had been shuttered tight. In the light from the hall, he could see a chair pushed back from a desk, bedclothes nearly straightened, and a pile of papers that had fallen over on the desk, like it the place been left in a hurry.

“We weren’t to touch the lord’s rooms, milord, since Lord Stannis left,” the steward said.

Gendry scuffed one of his boots on the floor and wondered if he should bless his uncle’s spirit or denounce him as a traitor. Did it matter anymore?

Gendry walked inside and threw open the windows one by one, and lines of buttery light cut through the darkness of the room.

“I’ll let you settle in, milord,” the steward said and shut the door behind him.

A heavy wardrobe carved from dark wood dominated the far wall, and Gendry opened it next. At first glance, it looked almost empty, just a few tunics in black and grey and gold hanging in a neat line. But as he pushed them to one side, he saw that they were hung in place to cover a pile of clothes strewn on the floor of the wardrobe, collecting dust and wrinkles.

Gendry picked up tunics, trousers, capes, cloth in every color of the rainbow and black and white and brown besides. They were all crumpled from the time they’d spent piled away, and a few had been torn apart. His hands stilled on a brown leather tunic with slashes over the shoulders, which looked like they had been done on purpose. He wondered whose it had been. The servants might know, they had known all the past lords, after all. All of who were dead now.

Gendry’s stomach dropped. He’d never been able to choose his own clothing before, and he knew he should be grateful for everything his family had left behind, but wearing a dead man’s clothes suddenly seemed ghoulish.

He shoved the clothes back where he had found them. 

*~*~*~*~*

Storm’s End had been running smoothly on its own since Lord Stannis left years ago, and Gendry wondered if he was really needed, as it kept on running no matter what he did. In the days after he arrived, the steward introduced Gendry to everyone who lived at the castle and did all the work while Gendry was measured for new clothes and ate fine food. Everyone seemed absurdly impressed that Gendry remembered their names and faces, but he’d always been good with that sort of thing.

Perhaps, he thought over a fine beef stew and a glass of Arbor gold, he could wander the Stormlands. The castle ran smoothly without his help. It had for years, so why change that now?

That afternoon, he asked for a horse to be saddled for him. He was still not used to riding the things but he could make it go slow, couldn’t he?

That was when he noticed the forge.

The blacksmith had left it untended, and the crude beginnings of a sword lay smoldering in the hot rocks around the fire. His palms itched, and he reached out to it.

“Milord?” The blacksmith emerged from around the corner of the shed, a tall, bearded man named Harin that Gendry had met two days ago.

Gendry jumped back and bowed his head. “So sorry.”

Harin wiped his large hands on his leather apron. “Ya have nothin’ to be sorry about, milord.”

“I mean that I meant no disrespect to your work,” he said. “I used to be a blacksmith.”

“I know,” Harin said. The man had big hands, big arms, and a big smile. He picked the sword-to-be from the fire and started hammering it.

Gendry envied him.

“We should be making ya some armor,” the blacksmith said.

“Will I need any?” Gendry said. “The war’s over.”

“These are uncertain times, milord.”

“Still,” Gendry said, “I don’t need anything new. With all the things my father and my uncles left behind, I’m sure there’s some armor somewhere.”

“And whose clothes fit you best, milord?”

Gendry blinked. His throat felt thick and wooly. “None of them are perfect,” he said. “I’ll have to have them… altered.”

Harin nodded as if he hadn’t heard any of Gendry’s uncertainty. “We can reshape any armor ya like, milord.”

“Thank you,” Gendry said, and then he wanted nothing more than to leave. He swung up onto the horse that had been brought into the courtyard. The effort of staying on it without making a fool of himself might just take his mind off of the fact that he had a castle, but all he wanted was his old forge.

*~*~*~*~*

On the road leading to the forest, Gendry looked at over at the people still gathered by the shore. The crowd was smaller than it had been when he arrived at Storm’s End. Gendry imagined some of them had kept wandering, in search of a more welcoming place.

“Are we going to do anything for them?” Gendry asked Theo, one of the guards who’d escorted him outside the walls.

“The steward makes sure they’re fed,” Theo said.

“Is that all?”

Theo shrugged. “What else can we do?”

“Offer them jobs? A place to stay in the castle?”

Gendry looked over at the other guards.

“You might, if you wanted, my lord,” said Addam. “If you believe Storm’s End could house them all.”

Gendry halted his horse, and was grateful when the animal obeyed without hesitation. He stared from the people by the shore to Storm’s End and back again. Gendry had grown up in King’s Landing, where poor families lived in cramped rooms, so he thought there was more than enough room in the castle. But perhaps the people of the Stormlands were used to better conditions than that.

“It’s a large castle,” he said.

He could offer them land, couldn’t he? But as he looked out beyond the castle, he saw the fields dotted with farmhouses. If he gave these new travelers lands of their own, who would he be taking them from? Even if he was their lord, he owed it to his new subjects to learn who they were before giving their land away to strangers.

He kicked his horse into a gallop and raced into the woods.

*~*~*~*~*

The summons, when it came, was a relief. Called to King’s Landing to pass judgment on Jon Snow, something Gendry felt even less ready for than life at Storm’s End, but at least it was different from reading Renly and Stannis’s old papers and pretending he understood them.

Two days out from King’s Landing, Gendry’s guards spotted another rider traveling south. As they grew closer, Gendry recognized the horse… no, he only thought he did. Then he recognized the rider by the cloak she wore… and he told himself once more that he was only seeing things.

Then her face came into view.

Gendry’s heart fell into his stomach. He gripped the reins of his horse’s bridle until his knuckles turned white, and rode calmly ahead to meet Arya Stark.

Gendry’s guards halted when he did.

“Lord Gendry,” Arya said with a smile, “I was coming south to meet you.”

 _Why? You left me._ Gendry cleared his throat, trying to think of something to say. “Really?” was all he came up with. “You took a risk, coming without sending a raven.”

She grinned. “This is the main road to King’s Landing,” she said. And then, “May I ride with you?”

Gendry felt like he’d swallowed a storm and it buffeted about in his chest. He was not getting enough air, then far too much… _You refused me,_ he wanted to scream. _You refused me._

“Of course,” he said.

Gendry and Arya rode together ahead of his guard, as though Theo and Addam and the rest could sense that they wanted privacy.

“Are you going back to King’s Landing?” Gendry asked her.

“To speak at my brother’s trial.” One hand reached for her slender sword. “The Northern army is marching south, and Sansa, Bran and I sailed down from Eastwatch. We’re a strange lot to bring to a trial, my magic brother and my queenly sister and I…”

Gendry thought of notes his uncle Stannis had scrawled over his uncle Renly’s papers… of fine clothes torn and hidden away…

 _My family’s stranger_ , he thought.

He envied her, in the moments he wasn't utterly besotted. She knew more about she was and who she waned to be than he ever would.

“I believe you’ll do a fine job of freeing Jon," he said. "I don’t know why I’m needed.”

“But you are,” she said, and the pitch of her voice made a shiver run down his spine.

“I didn’t know I was needed by anyone,” he said. He knew it was harsh, but she’d said worse to him.

They rode in silence for a long, long moment. He wanted to break away and ride ahead, but he wasn’t the one who ought to leave.

When she spoke, it was a whisper. “I don’t fit behind any walls, I hope you know that…”

 _I don’t, either_ , he wanted to say. He held his tongue, though, at the tender look on her face.

“But that doesn’t mean I never wanted to see you again,” she said.

Gendry kept his face blank and turned his eyes to the road ahead. “What’s changed?”

“I can’t go about my life alone. I think I realize that now.”

“You’re not alone. You have a family.”

“But I want you, too.”

He wheeled about in the road, blocking her horse’s path, looked her directly in the eye, and let himself say it. “Do you have any idea how difficult it was to see you again and then have to say goodbye? Do you have _any idea_?”

Her eyes widened and her jaw grew slack.

“You wanted me, then you wanted _nothing_ to do with me, all in the span of about two days. And now you’re here! _What am I to do about a n y of this_?”

Now that he’d said it Gendry’s head felt light, and his breath came easier. The devastated look on Arya’s face brought him back down to earth. Because she’d heard him say that, and nothing he could do could make her unhear it.

Gendry shifted in his saddle, aware that any privacy they had was now gone.

“Do you want me to leave?” Arya asked, her brows furrowed. 

“You hurt me.”

“I know.”

“Can you tell me why?”

Arya looked as though she was trying, her mouth open and moving without any sound, her hands tightening on the reins.

Gendry looked away. 

"I love you," she said.

His heart beat so hard, it felt like a heavy bruise inside Gendry's chest.

"Could you ever trust me again?"

"Of course I can. I love you."

Their horses shifted, and Gendry watched the dust rise from the road beneath their hooves.

"It's two days until we reach King's Landing," Arya said. "I think that will be enough time for me to answer your questions?"

He nodded. "Should be."

"So will you ride with me?"

The smile at the corner of her mouth was a spark, and it lit up something inside of him he had no felt since Winterfell. 

"Anywhere, milady," he said.


End file.
